The Avatar and the Real Girl
by Pickwick12
Summary: As a child, Sherlock Holmes created a Mind Palace with a girl inside who represented all of his favorite scientific things. When he's a man, he meets Molly Hooper, who looks a lot like the girl he's always pictured. The problem is, real life is never as good as what's inside his mind. Or is it? Maybe, sometimes, it's even better. Sherlolly
1. The Pirate Ship

My first mind palace was a pirate ship.

When I was eight years old, my class learned about Cicero. I already knew about him because my mother had read me a book about notable Romans when I was six, and I remembered it. That book, however, did not mention anything about Memory Palaces.

"Your Palace can be anything you like," said Mr. Abbott, his nasal voice becoming interesting to me for once. "And it can be populated by anyone you desire, as long as they remind you of things you might want to remember." I went home that afternoon with an assignment to write down what my memory palace would look like and who might live in it.

"What story shall we have tonight, Brother-Mine?" Mycroft came into my room at eight-thirty sharp. He was never late a moment in his life, I don't believe, including at birth—he was a day early. As a teenager, my brother was no more caring than he is now. He couldn't be; it wouldn't be possible for anyone to care more than Mycroft does. I've always thought that was glaringly obvious, but most people are too stupid to see the obvious facts in front of them.

Using Redbeard as a pillow, I lay across the end of my bed. " _Treasure Island_ ," I said, closing my eyes in anticipation of the delicious words washing over me. I loved every bit of Stevenson's tale. I could smell the salty air and feel the tingle of the ocean breeze washing over me.

"Again?" Mycroft pretended to complain, but he didn't really mind.

As my brother's precise voice intoned each syllable, a picture began to form in my mind—a ship, old and wooden, but sturdy, with tall sails flapping in the breeze. My ship. It was grand and tall and imposing as the waves crashed around it.

Mummy would be there for maths—she wrote books about it. Dad would be there for all the extra things, the common sense things, like where Mummy had parked the car outside Tesco when she couldn't remember because she was thinking about Algebraic Equations.

I wasn't sure if I wanted Mycroft in my Mind Palace. A part of me was afraid he would show all of my other memory-people that he was cleverer than me and make them not want to be mine any more. But I couldn't get rid of him, either. He became Latin, something I was just learning. I should have known then that I couldn't get rid of him any more than I could get rid of myself. He's been a permanent fixture in every incarnation of my Memory Palace, like it or not, the archenemy I can't live without.

Mr. Abbott my teacher, appeared on the quarterdeck of my ship, wearing his faded cardigan and round glasses. He represented everything else I might need to remember from school. I blinked and changed him into Mr. Winslow, my teacher from the previous year. I had liked him better. He'd let me read when I finished my work before the other children.

I couldn't think of any other areas to include except the most important one of all—science. I thought then, as I do now, that science was beautiful. It explained the world and music and medicine and why some arguments made sense and others didn't. Cabbages and kings alike could be defined by it. I couldn't think of anyone clever enough—and, to my childish mind, magical enough—to represent science, so I made someone up. I didn't know if I was supposed to do that, but I did it anyway.

Mummy was the cleverest person I knew, and Mummy was a girl, so I thought science should be a girl, too. I didn't much care if she was pretty, but she had long hair, pulled back like I'd seen the lady scientists wear their hair on a school trip to a pharmaceutical laboratory. I couldn't see her face very specifically in my mind, but I knew she was smiling at me.

"Hello, Science," I thought.

"Hello, Sherlock," she answered. "I like your ship."

Even at eight, I knew that science was not really an imaginary friend with long brown hair. But I liked my pirate lady scientist.

Mycroft read three chapters, then shut the well-worn book and set it on my nightstand. "Go to sleep, Sherlock," he said, passing a hand over my hair, which was as curly as his was straight, unlike my body, which was straight and bony where his was curved.

"Good night, Sherlock." Mummy was wearing a blue sock on her right foot and a red sock on her left. She hadn't noticed.

"Sleep well, Son." My father, ever the practical one, brought me a glass of water and leaned over to kiss my forehead. "Redbeard's showing his age," he mumbled as he left the room. I coiled my arms around my best friend's neck and held on tightly. That night, I dreamed I was a pirate with a first mate who twisted her long brown hair into two braids while she told me all about the periodic table of elements.

The next morning, I handed in my mind palace assignment, and Mr. Abbott peered at me over his spectacles. "Science on a pirate ship," he mused. "I often wonder about you, young Holmes."


	2. The Library

From the time that I was eight to the time that I was eleven, I put a lot of things into my memory ship. I started reading the newspaper and all the books I could find about criminal cases, because I loved the idea of detectives like Poirot and Dupin and Lord Peter Wimsey, who followed every clue to the end of a case. My mother said it was odd. For once, she was the one who didn't think something was normal, but my father said it was all right. Strange thing, that. My father isn't like my mother or my brother or me, but he's himself, and sometimes that's better.

When I'd exhausted all of our books that interested me, my father finally got tired of hearing me ask for more, so he took me to London and got me a library card. I will never forget stepping into a real, big-city library for the very first time. It was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen, with its stacks upon stacks of fragrant books, rows that seemed endless to my childish mind.

Father tried to take me to the children's section, but I dragged him to true crime and checked out as many books as I could carry. He didn't bat an eye, and when the librarian raised her eyebrow and asked if he was "sure these are appropriate," he nodded.

"Oh yes, my son's going to be a policeman." Everyone assumed that, back then, especially when Carl Powers died. I don't know what I thought, other than that I liked reading about crime and detection more than I liked doing anything else in the world.

I didn't know Powers, and we didn't go to the same school. His murder, ruled an accidental drowning, was on the news the way tragedies are always used as bait for the journalistic vultures to pounce. Mycroft said he didn't think the case made any sense, but that was as far as he went.

I got obsessed, they said. I wouldn't call it that. It was just the first time I had ever known what it was to care about a puzzle so much that nothing else mattered—not eating, not sleeping, and not stories. I just wanted to find the answer.

 _Help me_ , I whispered to the Science Girl in my head, and she did. She asked me what they'd done with the boy's shoes. So I went to the library. I went and read every single thing I could get my hands on about the case, but there was never a single word about the shoes.

The day after I'd finished every article in every publication I could find, I told Dad about it and asked to go to the police station so I could tell someone. "Son," he said, with his hand on my shoulder, "you'll have to write a letter."

I wrote to Scotland Yard, but I was angry, and I snuck out. I was sure that if I could just tell them the truth, get them to see, someone would understand. It turns out, my father was right. The lady at the desk looked at me like I was crazy, and a bored uniform cop escorted me home. No one would listen to a word I said.

"I hate them," I said to Dad, who wasn't particularly angry that I'd defied him. "I hate the police." He just shook his head and put me on his lap with his arm around me, showing me the crime section in the newspaper to cheer me up. I used to not mind that sort of thing.

Later, I stormed to my room and lay down on my bed. stretched out with an arm across Redbeard. "Why don't they understand like we do?" I asked the girl in my head. Of course, I knew she was my own creation, but she was so real to me by then that it was like she'd taken on a character of her own, independent of me.

"I don't know," she answered. She was holding one of the books I'd seen at the library, and it gave me an idea. After all, a library is bigger than a pirate ship, and it's a much more convenient place to store information.

"I'd like to live in a library," I said to the brown-haired Science Girl.

"Me too," she answered. Of course she did. She was part of my consciousness.

"I can't because I'm real," I whispered, "but you can." In that moment, my Mind Palace transformed. No longer was it a pirate ship on the high seas; it was a huge building with endless floors and row upon row of bookshelves, populated by ever-expanding group of avatars who represented the things I knew and wanted to remember.


	3. The Sea

It wasn't long after Carl Powers's death that I thought my Mind Palace was gone for good, taking my Science Girl with it.

You wouldn't think such a huge thing could start out so normally, so averagely, but that's how life is. I know it now; I didn't know it then. The day I jumped off Bart's was as normal as—but I'm getting ahead of myself, and I hate disordered thinking more than anything in the world.

A few months after the murder, I went to a normal day of school and came home to a family meeting. Mummy had taken Redbeard to the veterinarian, and she said he had cancer.

"Not going to get better, Old Boy," said Dad kindly, patting my knee.

"Sorry, love," said Mummy.

Mycroft sat in the corner and tried to act like he didn't care, but I could see on his face that he did.

I looked around at each of them in turn, but I couldn't figure out what they were trying to say. Finally, Dad broke the heavy silence. "We're going to put him down."

He never called me Old Boy. It was always Sherlock or Son.

"No," I said simply. It was as if he'd spoken in a different language. I couldn't, wouldn't, understand. I got up, called Redbeard, and ran out the door of our house before anyone else had a chance to react.

I was wearing a sweater, but even if I hadn't been, I wouldn't have cared about the cold. For the first time in my life, I wished my Memory Palace existed somewhere outside of my mind. I wanted to go there, to take Redbeard there, to live in the library with the Science Girl where nothing could harm us.

Instead, I ran to the abandoned house about a mile from ours, and I took Redbeard inside, and we sat on the floor of the living room, surrounded by peeling wallpaper, and I held my best friend and cried.

They found me, of course. I was too big to carry, but my father carried me home over his shoulder anyway and tucked me into bed like he had when I was much younger. I refused to look at him, wouldn't respond or speak, even though he sat with me for a long time.

Dad took Redbeard away a week later. He tried to hug me, but I did not let him, and I did not speak to him or to Mycroft or to my mother for several days. I did not visit the library in my mind, and I decided that I would never feel anything again. Most people think that's a silly thing to decide, but I was good at it, at least I thought I was.

After that, I didn't want to have a Mind Palace any more. I didn't understand that the ugly things, the sad things, the terrible things make us who we are as much as the bright and shiny things do. It took me far longer than it should have to figure that out.

The problem is, when I finally wanted to see the Science Girl again, after a week, I couldn't find her. It was like my brain had gone blank. I pictured the library, but all I found there were empty shelves and dark corridors.

"Where are you?" I called to her, but she didn't come. I didn't much mind that my mother and father and Mycroft and Mr. Winslow weren't there any more. But wanted to talk to the brown-haired girl.

After the second day of not being able to find my girl, my class went on a school trip to the water. I was sad and angry and lonely, and no one talked to me. My classmates were starting to realize I was different. I didn't much mind because I was starting to realize that most of them were stupid.

I stood at the edge of the pier and watched the waves float by and imagined taking the library in my mind and chucking it into the sea, shelf by shelf. Finally, I imagined the whole building sinking into the waves, as if my pain and anger and grief were swallowing all the good and happy things whole.

I felt lighter and flatter after I was done, as if nothing mattered any more and I was weightless, as if my whole body were made out of the curls that bobbed and bounced on my head and I didn't have a care in the world and thought and felt nothing. Many years later, when I got high for the first time, the exact same feeling came back to me with startling clarity.

I got home from the seaside that night, and my father was cooking. He always cooks; my mother would burn the house down and nearly has, several times. Sometimes, when they want to be funny or impress someone, they act like she cooked, but it's never true. That pork pie recipe you asked for is my father's, by the way, but never mind that.

Anyway, he looked me up and down and said, "Good evening, Sherlock."

"Dad," I said. It was the first word I'd spoken to any of them in over a week. I looked him up and down in return, and I put as much coldness and loathing into that glance as I possibly could. He flinched. It was the first time I'd ever made anyone flinch, and it felt good, in a perverse, scary sort of way.

That was the first night Mycroft and I ever fought. I don't mean we hadn't wrestled or tussled before, but we'd never tried to actually hurt each other, not physically anyway. He called me a "stupid little boy" for caring about a dog. I attacked him.

There was blood and heat and fire running through me. I pinned him onto the floor. He was bigger, but slower, and he couldn't outfight me. He screamed that I was an idiot. I pulled his hair.

My father dragged me off my brother and held me. I stood as still as a statue and wouldn't respond, wouldn't give him the satisfaction. "It's all right, Sherlock," he said quietly. But it wasn't, and I knew it never would be again. Mycroft got up and stared daggers at me, as if he would have killed me if he could. My father went in to talk to him, but I don't think he responded any more than I did.

Later that night, Mummy came into my room in her floral robe. "Sweetheart," she said (her ridiculous name for me), "I've decided to get violin lessons for you."


	4. The Concert Hall

I didn't know, until I met Mr. Woodcott, that music was really mathematics, mathematics made into notations that can be put in combinations so beautiful they hurt to hear. I loved the violin. The violin is what brought my Science Girl back to me.

My mother drove me to Mr. Woodcott's house four days after she announced her intention to get me lessons. She didn't say anything on the way, and I didn't much mind. I wasn't opposed to going, but I didn't expect to enjoy it either.

"Hello, Sherlock." My teacher was a man of fifty-three, who was nearsighted and thin and had a peculiar fondness for red bush tea. He used to brew it for me, and I drank it. Not because I liked it, but because it was interesting. I've always been that way about things, but you know that.

He shook hands with me and said goodbye to my mother, then handed me a maths worksheet and a pencil. I was puzzled, but I completed it and gave it back. He scanned it quickly with his eyes. "This is very promising," he said.

"My mother," I said, rather proudly, "is a maths professor." She may be slightly mad, but Mycroft and I have never disparaged her academic achievements.

Mr. Woodcott smiled. "That's why I agreed to take you on. I don't teach many students any more. Only the very, very clever ones."

After that, he picked up his violin, an old, time-worn one that had resonance so beautiful I remember its voice to this day. And he played. I wish you had been there, but of course you were, in way.

"Hello, Sherlock," I heard in my mind. "I've missed you." She had returned, my Science Girl. The music had brought her back, had made her real to me again. But she was alone, and in my mind's eye I saw her standing in the middle of nothing.

Mr. Woodcott didn't put an instrument in my hands that day, but that night, he took me to the symphony. The soloist played Sarasate, still my favorite composer for violin. For the first time, I understood the power music has over my mind. I have long since been sober of any chemical substance, but music is still my drug of choice.

As I lost myself in the orchestra, a new Mind Palace formed around the Science Girl, a huge concert hall in which each piece of knowledge was represented by a musician playing a different instrument - Mr. Woodcott on violin for music, Poe's Dupin, one of my heroes, on cello to represent detection, something I was just beginning to really understand. One by one, I populated my concert hall, but I did not put my family in it. I no longer wanted them. My girl was there, of course, the same as she'd always been, except she'd gotten a little older, just like me.


	5. The Castle

By the time I was I was fourteen, I wanted to be a knight. In school, we were reading Malory's _Le Morte d'Arthur_ when I decided I wanted to slay dragons. My desire to exact justice was a jumbled mixture of idealism and anger. I had not forgotten Redbeard, and my relationship with my family had irrevocably changed. My mother saw it as the natural maturing of my mind; my father knew that I had gone deeper into myself, to a place from which I never intended to return.

It felt natural, during this time, to change my Memory Palace from the limited scope of the concert chamber into a vast castle, filled with suits of armor and swords, accented with turrets. After all, why not a castle for a palace? My imagination was as vivid as it is now, and I clothed all of the my avatars in Medieval dress and furnished sumptuous, tapestry-covered rooms for them.

All of them except the Science Girl. She stood in her lab coat in the middle of my castle's keep and laughed at me. "I am not a damsel, Sherlock Holmes," she said. "You cannot change me." And so, as my subjects changed around her and did my bidding, repositories of the knowledge I was still gaining, she remained the same. I could not be angry with her. After all, if she had not come back to me after Redbeard, I would have had no Mind Palace at all, just as, if you had not stayed with me, I would not be here to have one.

I learned a great deal during my early teenaged years, the majority of it outside school. One of the most important things was about anonymous police tip lines. I began to study cases and report their solutions to the local office. Often, the policemen and policewomen who answered the calls paid no attention to what I said, but, a few times, I was granted the triumph of a solved case. I didn't get credit, of course, but I didn't care. I never have.

I was fifteen when I solved my first murder. It was a seemingly straightforward case—a woman killed and a husband with no alibi and a history of domestic battery. But it was wrong. I watched him on television, and he was the disturbed sort who has delusions that wife-beating is somehow an act of love, but he was not a murderer. I had begun to study human behavior, with particular interest, of course, in the psychology of murder.

Two days before the unfortunate man stood trial, I called his lawyer's office and reached his assistant. I hadn't seen the crime scene—even I couldn't manage that at fifteen—but I told the man what I suspected, that the wife had been murdered by her brother, who had been on the periphery of the case the whole time and whose motive, I thought, was to collect all of his father's considerable life insurance policy. It was strangely straightforward, but the police are always excellent at ignoring obvious facts that do not match their preconceived conclusions.

The case was discussed in the evening news, and the man was acquitted. To the credit of the barrister, he admitted that an anonymous source had assisted with the investigation. I did not tell my family that I was involved, but as I was getting ready to go to bed, my father put a hand on my shoulder. "Well done, Dragon-Slayer," he said. Though I did not like to admit it to myself, I felt a glow of warmth pass through me.

As I lay my head on the pillow, I saw the Science Girl smiling. "You're happy tonight."

"I suppose so," I mentally replied, feeling sleep descending. "Thank you for helping me with the clues."

"Go to sleep, silly boy," she said. "There will be plenty more murders after this one." She didn't mind corpses any more than I did.


	6. The University

When I was seventeen, in the middle of half-term examinations, my mother came into my room one day. "Sherlock, you're very clever," she said, as if she had just discovered the fact.

"Yes, Mummy," I answered, distracted by my notes on the life cycle of the earthworm.

"Your father and I have been discussing university, Darling. Do you want to join your brother at Oxford?"

"No!" I said vehemently, suddenly and violently attentive to her words.

"All right," she said mildly, clearly confused by my outburst, but resigned to it, since much about human behavior confuses her. "Do you have somewhere else in mind?"

"Cambridge," I said shortly. "They have an excellent chemistry program."

"That's settled, then," said Mummy brightly.

A year and a half later, when I was eighteen and seven months, I packed my suitcase and put the train ticket my father had procured for me into the right side pocket of my jacket. Mummy had a class that day, so she kissed my cheek in the morning and told me to be good, exactly as if I were four years old and going to a birthday party. I watched her leave, and as usual, she forgot her satchel and had to come back for it. I didn't worry, though. I knew Dad would take care of her, just as he always has.

My father walked me to the station, neither one of us saying anything until we reached the entrance. He stopped walking, and I looked at him, finding, to my horror, that he had tears in his eyes. "I wish you would—forgive me," he said. We had never spoken out loud of the rift between us.

"I have no logical reason to be angry with you," I answered.

"And yet, you are," he replied. "You know what that means, Son? It means you're human. There's no escaping that." He wrapped his arms around me, and for the first time in years, I returned the embrace, letting him hold onto me until he was finished and pulled away.

"Be good, Sherlock," he said, but it was nothing like the way my mother had said it. It was a wish for me and a blessing.

I boarded the train, trying to deny to myself that I had tears in my own eyes, but the Science Girl wouldn't let me. "You're crying, Sherlock. What does that mean?"

"Crying is a physical response to emotional or physical affect, often as a result of painful or highly emotional stimuli," I answered.

"So why are you crying?" she asked. "It's not a hard question."

"This is a very unscientific conversation," I sulked to the woman inside my mind.

"Not at all," she replied. "Science recognizes human bonds and their importance in the higher function of the brain."

"Very well," I answered, taking a deep breath and leaning against the window. "I'm crying because—I'm not angry any more, and I feel relieved."

"And?" She was unrelenting, this mental construct who made me explore every corner of myself, no matter how painful.

"Because I love my father, and he loves me."

I wanted to be angry that I had allowed myself to feel something again, but I couldn't manage it. I felt lighter and calmer and safer, and I slept deeply for the remainder of the journey to my new home in Cambridge, where I began classes a week later.

I found university quite boring until I met Victor, my first true friend. The cause of our meeting was my trip to the library two months into my first semester to get a book on the Memory Palace technique, only to find that it had been checked out already, by a third year student named V. Trevor. I wanted it enough to hunt him down and ask if I could borrow it for a day or two, since that's all it would take me to read it and store it in my mind.

I found him in the quad, a handsome nineteen-year-old with broad shoulders. As soon as I asked, he took me to his room and handed the book over without any hesitation. "I've heard about you," he said. "You're the one who tells everyone their life story by looking at them, right?" I was already growing wary of people and their responses to the skill my childhood studies of detection had produced, but I nodded curtly.

He squared his shoulders and grinned at me. "Well, lay it on me. I just gave you the book. Shouldn't I get something back?"

"You're both a skilled student and an exceptional athlete—wrestling or boxing, judging by your physique. You drink, but not excessively. You like women, but you're single, and you have an excellent relationship with your father. Judging by the book, you're interested in the Mind Palace, either for an assignment or personal enrichment."

As I finished speaking, I realized what an inoffensive list it was. Most people, when they asked me to tell them who they were, expected to hear positive, glowing things, but I almost invariably discovered that they were cheaters, binge drinkers, liars, slobs, or fakers. Once I'd exposed them, they hated me. Trevor just blushed a little and smiled. "Very true," he said, "and it's boxing. I'm captain of the university team."

That was when he sized me up. "Do you participate in any sports, Holmes?"

"No," I answered, "not my area."

"Well," he continued, "I have some observational skills of my own—not as good as yours, but I'm pretty good at sizing up physical potential; I have to do it all the time. Judging by your physicality, you're unusually strong for how thin you are, and you're very light on your feet. Plus, your height is above average. You'd be a good boxer."

I stared at him. No one had ever suggested or even hinted that I would be skilled in any kind of physical endeavor. Until then, I had been nearly as sedentary as Mycroft, though my metabolism compensated more than his did. I wasn't opposed to the idea, though. I needed something to do during the free time I didn't need in order to excel in my courses.

Trevor grinned again. "We train Friday afternoons. Come if you're up for it."

I didn't know if I was up for it, but as I said before, I was bored. It was difficult to get access to any sort of real police cases while I was in Cambridge, and my studies took very little of my time. Also, I finally admitted to myself, I liked Trevor. For once, I had met someone who smiled constantly and meant it every time.

So I went. I won't bore you with details you already know. I was very good at boxing, and when Trevor graduated and passed the captaincy on to someone else, I took up fencing and martial arts, both of which have been very useful to me in my work—but I am beginning to digress, something I despise in myself as much as in others.

It turned out that Victor had a Mind Palace of his own. He did not have the natural memory I possess, but he was as keen on the topic as I was. He told me that his palace was a gymnasium, in which all the equipment and athletes acted as containers of knowledge.

He made me think. I was no longer the child who had come up with a feudal castle for himself, and while I did not wish to imitate my friend's method, I decided I needed a new one. My solution wasn't revolutionary, but it was useful. My palace became a university campus.

I now realize that this was the beginning of my discovery of the true potential of structuring one's memory around Cicero's concept. The university in my mind was far more complicated than any of my other frameworks had been. It had wings for literature and art, an orchestra room for music, and dormitories where I stored my observations of human behavior. For the first time, the Science Girl had a laboratory, sleek and modern and filled with apparatuses that held my knowledge about medicine, chemistry, biology, and forensics.

One particularly fanciful day, when I'd finished a paper on the works of Shakespeare, I found my girl in my mind. "Do you like your new home?" I asked. "It suits you."

She laughed at me. "For being so smart, it's certainly taken you long enough to put me into my proper environment."

"You used to have all the knowledge inside you," I said. "Now you're the way I interpret all the things I know that are contained in different parts of your lab. You're like a computer to help bring up the information I want."

"Yes," she said. "You're growing up, and your brain is different than it used to be."

For a moment, I felt illogical anxiety. "You're—not going to leave, are you?" I asked her.

She laughed again. "You made me up, Sherlock. How could I go anywhere?" Even as a young man entering my twenties, I wished, for a moment, that she could be real.

During my years at Cambridge, I strolled the halls of my Memory Palace often, adding new rooms and wings as I needed them. I made few friends, and I usually didn't mind. I told the Science Girl things. Sometimes she laughed at me; sometimes she made me face truths I didn't want to see. I knew that she was a part of me, a part I desperately needed in order to avoid complete arrogance and self-ignorance. But you know my weaknesses, and I have no need to recount them to you. I suppose there's a strange happiness in that.


	7. The City

Once I finished my chemistry degree, I moved into a tiny flat in a grimy corner of London. I had no desire to join the official police force and be bound by its endless regulations or to become a teacher of any kind, or, I really don't need to add, to join the civil service, where my brother was already rising with astonishing rapidity. By then, my parents had, I believe, given up the notion that I was likely to become anything conventional.

No, those were the days when I set out to learn the ways of the city that is my temperamental mistress to this day. One week I would load lorries with huge boxes filled with machine parts, another I might be typing correspondence for a law firm, the next delivering take-away food. My longest stint in one job was as nanny to seven-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. I was very good at it, as I always am with children. They haven't learned to be stupid like their parents yet. I liked that position; it gave me ample opportunities to observe the wealthy of London and to understand their world.

I walked the alleys and streets; I was mugged; once a woman saw me and tried to recruit me to become a model. Said I had an interesting face. It was one of the most absurd conversations of my life, but I loved London, and she loved me. We were strangely suited to each other, like the yin to the yang. I was the introvert, she the extravert. I was solitary, she dizzyingly sociable. Most of all, she contained the crimes that fueled my passion for detection. I am not such a heartless man as to wish for evil that doesn't already exist, but if people are going to commit crimes, I'd rather they do it near enough to me that I can find them out.

Gradually, people began to notice me. I discovered embezzlement at a company for which I spent a month doing data entry. I helped a divorce attorney find evidence of an affair. I told a shipping company why its shipments were always just short. My real emergence, however, came when Andrew Porter went missing.

As I mentioned above, I was a nanny for several months, to two children of very wealthy and extremely busy parents. My duties included readying the children for school and taking them, picking them up, and then staying with them for most of the evening and assisting with their schoolwork. Sometimes I was required past midnight, but during the day, I had ample time to explore as I wished. On school holidays, I took Andrew and Alex to the library and the science museum and the aquarium. They asked questions, and I knew the answers. We got on very well.

I will allow a tangent here, knowing the sort of thing you'd ask. I did not have trouble with the children. I don't believe much in intuition, but when it comes to humans under the age of fifteen, I possess a kind of sixth sense. The two As were fond of me, but they did not try to cross me; they knew that I was immovable. Besides, I didn't ask them to behave in illogical ways. As I constantly tried to tell their mother, children respond to logical routines. She only ever laughed and said she was glad to have me, which was infuriating. The As still write to me through my website. Andrew is and artist, and Alex is a police detective. She claims it's because of me.

I had been with the Porters for six months when Andrew went missing. I left him in his parents' hands at 9:00 one evening, but when I arrived at 7:00 the ext morning to feed breakfast to the twins, I found the mansion in chaos. Andrew and Alex did not share a room, and his absence had not been discovered until his sister had gone into his room that morning to wake him up.

Mrs. Porter was crying hysterically, her husband was trying to talk to a police inspector, and I saw that a team had already been into the boy's room and was scanning the house for evidence. More like destroying evidence, really. Their methods weren't any better than they are now.

No one at all was paying any attention to Alex, who was small and pale, with red hair and freckles that went across her nose. I found her in the linen closet, hiding behind the clean was a large closet, so I sat down beside her, and she climbed into my lap and put her arms around my neck.

"The policeman asked me what happened," she whispered. "I don't like him."

"I don't like him either," I agreed, " He's quite stupid, but what did happen? Can you tell me?"

"Me and Andy always watch cartoons before you come, but I watched a whole one by myself, and he never came down. I went up to see if he was still sleeping, and he wasn't there."

"All right," I answered. "I need you to do something very hard. Do you think you can do it for me?"

"Ok," she said, her eyes wide.

"Close your eyes," I said. She obeyed immediately, and I cradled her head against my chest and spoke softly. "Now, Alex, think about last night. Imagine that you're lying in bed. Keep your eyes shut, and tell me about it."

"Mummy and Daddy put me to bed, and I don't remember anything else. Are you mad?"

"Shh," I said, "keep thinking. Did you hear anything? Smell anything?"

She was quiet for a moment. "Candy."

"Candy?" I asked, keeping my voice calm so I didn't upset her.

"Candy, like the fluffy kind," she said. "I smelled it."

"You're a clever girl," I said, getting up, "but we have to hurry."

I swung her up into my arms and walked as quickly as I could without running. "I'll take Alex for the day," I said to her mother on the way out, meeting with no objection from the frazzled woman.

I took the little girl to the Tube, my brain working as fast as I could possibly make it go. "Sherlock?" she asked, when we were seated side-by-side in a traincar, "is whoever took Andy going to take me?" She was clever enough to realize that kidnapping was the obvious implication.

"No," I said. "I'm going to find Andrew, and both of you are going to be safe." She looked terrified, so I pulled her close and wrapped the edge of my coat around her.

"All right," she said, and I knew she believed me.

I took her to the carnival, of course, the dodgy one her mother had taken the children to against my advice. From there, it was a depressingly pedestrian crime. Andrew had been kidnapped by the idiot who sold cotton candy, who was hoping to extract ransom money from the parents. The boy was rescued, unharmed except for having eaten about five times as much cotton candy as anyone should consume in a lifetime, and the perpetrator went to prison.

The Porters were thrilled, and they insisted on telling the story to all of their friends. The newspapers and blogs picked up the story—a "feel-good," they called it. The police noticed me, too—particularly the inspector on the case. Perhaps you've surmised that his name was Lestrade.

Ironically, I hadn't done much deduction on the case, other than paying attention to a child and figuring out what she meant, but soon after that, I received enough inquiries from prospective clients that I was able to pursue detection as my sole profession.

That was when my Mind Palace became more than a personal exercise; it became my livelihood. No longer did I restrict my concepts to a single building, even one as big as a university. The city herself became my palace. Her streets, her pubs, her alleys and corners, all lived in my memory, and into them I poured the things I needed to remember, like water filling a pitcher to overflowing.

A month after I'd entered private practice, a case called for me to visit St. Bart's. It's a glorious building, as you know. I walked the halls, trying to extract information from its assistant director, and I finally contrived to be taken to the morgue. I had no premonition whatsoever of the part it would play in my future.

I thought, as I stepped over the threshold, that my Science Girl would like to live in it. But of course, she was already there.


	8. The Morgue

I recall being an imaginative child, but I do not consider myself a fanciful man. I turn my mind toward problems of evidence and logic. However, as I came into the place where the Bart's corpses lie in peaceful repose, I was met with the most shocking sight of my entire life, with no exceptions.

A woman was leaning over a table, and as she stood to her feet, it was is if my brain had brought to life the girl who had, until then, only lived in my Memory Palace. She wore a white lab coat, her brown hair was pulled back, and she smiled. She was as plain and as perfect as I'd always imagined her.

"Mr. Holmes, this is our managing pathologist, Dr. Molly Hooper, though she prefers to drop the "Doctor" title. Molly, this is Mr. Sherlock Holmes. He'd like to look at one of the corpses who's just been brought in. I trust I can leave him in your hands." I heard the director's words, but I had a hard time attending to them because I was trying to figure out how the image my eyes were seeing could possibly really exist.

The girl—Molly—walked over, pulling off a pair of gloves. "Of course I will, Mr. Smythe. It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Holmes."

"Sherlock," I said quickly. She nodded shyly, blushing a little.

I cleared my throat. "I'd like to have a look at Mr. Winston, please."

"Are you sure?" she asked. He was in quite an unfortunate accident. I'm afraid he doesn't have a head, or, rather, it's not attached to him any more."

"That's quite all right," I answered. She had a halting way of speaking, not quite the way I'd have expected the Science Girl to sound, but she was just as competent. As she led me over to a sheet-covered figure, she described his injuries in admirably lurid detail.

Needless to say, I solved the case, a straightforward crime of passion. I'd bribed Smythe to let me into the morgue by proving that his wife was having the affair he already knew she was having, but it only bought me one visit.

Thankfully, Molly let me in as often as I liked. I manipulated her, and she was as gullible as anyone I'd ever met.

Except, she wasn't.

It took me long enough to realize what was happening. Actually, it was the Science Girl herself who told me. "Sherlock," she said, one night when I'd returned to my miserable flat that had paint peeling and an ever-present leak, "we ought to talk."

I hadn't talked to her in a very long time—I'd consulted her on cases, as I consulted all of the avatars in my Mind Palace when I needed them—but we hadn't conversed in the way that illuminated my mind and feelings. I think I was afraid that if I spoke to her, I would have to face the idea of the pathologist I'd just met.

She looked like her now, the vagueness of her facial features replaced by Molly's delicate bones and ready smile. I tried to resist the change for a while, but I couldn't help it. "You haven't been very nice to Molly," she said.

"I'm never nice," I retorted irritably.

"You know she's only humoring you to make you feel clever."

"I know," I answered. "I can't figure out why."

"That's ridiculous," she replied. "You're Sherlock Holmes; do the deductions."

So I thought, hard, about the things I don't usually consider—not that I don't notice them, but they're usually filed in my mind far below the case I'm working on—the people things.

Molly smiled when she saw me; she offered me coffee; she wore more makeup than usual when I came to the morgue; her pupils dilated, and I knew she wasn't taking drugs.

"See?" probed my mental voice.

"I see," I answered, and then, without another word, I dropped a veil over the Science Girl. I decided not to care. I had no intention of dealing with the implications of what I'd figured out, and so, my Science Girl's home became a true morgue—it contained her lifeless body, lying on a metal table. Mentally, I shut the door and locked it, with no plans ever to return.

I had two Science Girls, you see. I was confused, and I didn't know what to do about the one in my head and the one outside it, who was so much like my avatar but so different at the same time.

I ignored Molly when I didn't need her. If she was playing at acting less clever than she was, I would act less clever, too—pushing her away with my appearance of obliviousness. We were two idiots stepping around each other—but I still liked being in the same room with her, where I could steal a peek at her when she was distracted by her equipment.


	9. Lauriston Gardens

I'd never had a flatmate before John Watson. I know enough about the habits of most people to recognize that I am not considered an easy man to live with. I am given to long silences, violin playing at all hours, and doing malodorous experiments.

John didn't care about any of that. He went with me to see the body of the Pink Lady, and our partnership was sealed. At the time, I didn't understand how important that case was, how much it would both haunt and comfort me—haunt because of James Moriarty, comfort because it was the beginning of my first real friendship.

That, I suppose, is how, for the first time, a place entered my Mind Palace that I didn't directly plan to put there. Lauriston Gardens became part of me, a place I retreated within myself to think and reason.

I suppose, in a way, it replaced the drugs. I haven't mentioned those. I—didn't want to, but now they're intruding on my mind, and I realize it wouldn't be fair not to give them their place. You will notice, above, that I said little about those months in London when I took odd jobs, repugnant jobs, any job I could find. The truth is, I was an addict.

My mind has always been too fast for its own good, like a roman candle burning out before its time. When I was still in school, I tried a few different things, but it wasn't until I found cocaine that I encountered my true love. If London was my mistress, the drug was my nurse, dulling the pain of thoughts that would not quiet in the night.

The only person who knew was Mycroft. He found me, one day, when I actually had a flat to my name for a few weeks. He had access to records like that. He knocked on my door in the dead of night, and when I opened it, he was kind. That was the most chilling thing about it. My brother cares for me, but he does not show it with kindness.

"Sherlock," he said, "Mummy's worried."

"Don't you mean Dad?" I asked, as I was coming off my latest fix and feeling particularly wretched.

"No," he said. "It's been so long since you last contacted them that even Mummy's noticed."

That was when I realized. You see, up until then, I'd maintained the charade that I was in control, that I could stop whenever I wished and only used the drug as medication. Looking at my brother and thinking of my mother, I knew that I was mistaken.

He took me home with him. A lot of people think I went to rehab, but I didn't. My brother, who hates to be put out or do legwork or step outside his sphere of life, took me to his pristine apartment and kept me there. He found a doctor, had her visit discreetly and give me a treatment program. Mycroft watched my every move. I don't—I have very vague memories of the worst days of withdrawal. Mercifully, my brain seems to have blocked them out. But I believe I remember my brother holding me, once, when I cried.

It was Mycroft who found the Porters. Mrs. Porter worked for the state department, and she accepted me on my brother's word. Before I started, he pinned me to the wall with his hands and told me I'd better make a go of it or else—and I believed him. My brother doesn't make idle threats.

I did, of course, make a go of it, and finally, when I began my private practice, I had an occupation for my mind that kept me from burning up on the inside. Lauriston Gardens became the visual representation of the place I went within myself when the temptation was greatest.

I should add that Molly knew my history. I told it to her, one day, when she asked me how I knew so much about drugs and their effects. I could have told her anything—that I'd taken a class in pharmacology, that I'd had a friend who was an addict, that I had a particular interest in street drugs, but instead, I told her the truth. I didn't know why; she just had that effect on me.

"How do you know that?"

"I used to be addicted to cocaine, with occasional forays into other substances.

"I thought so."

I looked up from the microscope I'd been consulting and stared blankly at her. "How?"

"People like you usually have problems with self-medication."

"People like me."

"People who are—cleverer than the rest of us."

She said it in her usual halting way, but I watched her for a moment, and I saw her blush.

"You're above average," I said, returning to my work. "Nowhere near me, but certainly nothing to be ashamed of."

She laughed at me. "You're the most insulting colleague I've ever had, and that's saying something in the field of pathology."

Colleagues. I didn't mind the sound of that. In fact, I quite liked it.

I didn't bring anyone to the Lauriston Gardens in my mind except myself. It was my secret place within. Or, at least, I thought so until the morning I awoke with the old anxiety and found myself wishing i had cocaine in the apartment I shared with John. Quickly, I pictured the stairs of the Lauriston Gardens house and myself going up them, one at a time, pulling my mind away from the temptation.

When I reached the top, Molly was there. Or, not Molly—the Science Girl, whom I'd last left dead on the slab in the morgue in my mind.

"Hello, Sherlock," she said.

"Why aren't you dead?" I asked crossly.

"You can't kill a mental construct that easily," she retorted. "I've been a part of your life for far too long."

"Well," I rejoined, "the least you could do is stop wearing Molly Hooper's face."

"But I like it," she said, "which means that some part of you likes it." I realized that I wasn't going to be able to shift my imagination that easily. "Besides, you deserve some kind of penance for trying to kill me off. What if you'd needed me to solve a case?"

I had to admit she wasn't wrong. I was so used to using my Memory Palace to access my knowledge that it had become essential to my work. Without my avatars, I was in danger of being unable to access the labyrinths of information my mind contained.

"Very well," I said. "I won't make that mistake again."


	10. Feelings

Molly was always asking me if I wanted to get coffee. I always said yes and told her I wanted it black with two sugars. The first time, I'd been paying so little attention I'd actually failed to pick up on what she really meant. Upon reflection, I understood.

No one had ever asked me on a date before. Oh, as I began to build a following through my website and a few mentions in the newspaper—and, even more annoyingly, John's blog—I was propositioned on a regular basis. But even I know that's not the same thing as being asked out on a proper date by someone who knows me.

I had a vivid mental picture of the two of us at a cafe—me and my Science Girl, discussing the world over cups of espresso. Except, she wasn't my girl. She was the real, flesh-and-blood Molly.

"If she were really like you, I would go with her," I told my avatar.

"She's better than me," she answered. "She's real."

But real things, I knew, couldn't be better than the things in my mind. My thoughts were well-ordered, logical, and beautiful. Quantifiable. Real people like Molly were messy and imperfect, their lives strewn with emotions and complications.

But no matter what I did, Molly brought me coffee every time, just the way I liked it, and I imagined drinking it in my Memory Palace with a girl who looked just like her but was made up of reason and fact instead of cat pictures and a boyfriend who didn't love her.

The real-life Molly had caused something that had never happened to me before—she'd added something to my Mind Palace that I hadn't intended to keep there. I had no need for a coffee shop inside the place that held my collective knowledge. Oh, I knew where every variety of coffee bean came from, how it smelled, and how to tell from the grounds under someone's fingernails which kind they preferred, but I didn't need a Parisian-style cafe with outdoor tables and thick white ceramic mugs.

Whether I wanted it or not, there it was. Each time I took the coffee out of Molly's hand, like I said before, I saw myself with the Science Girl, except after a while, my mind started to confuse her with the real Molly Hooper, or to combine the two, until I didn't know who was sitting across from me inside my head.

I didn't make the mistake of trying to get rid of my girl again, but I didn't talk to her for ages, until John was angry with me—because he thought I didn't care.

For a time, John believed I didn't care about anyone or anything. He didn't know about Redbeard. I acted like I wasn't bothered by his doubts, but they stung. I was conflicted—wanting to be glad I had succeeded in seeming dispassionate even though I wasn't, and curiously ashamed of disappointing my friend. I say curiously because I wasn't used to caring what anyone thought of me, and to suddenly find out that John's opinion mattered to me was almost staggering.

I expended every bit of mental energy I had to solve the case of the innocent people with bombs strapped to them, but finally I had take a break. Even my mind is subject to human weariness and weakness.

I drank a quick cup of tea, and I entered my Memory Palace to relax there and refresh my thoughts. It was to be a less-than-calming visit, though. "You're a liar," said the Science Girl without any kind of preamble.

"What do you mean?"

"You let John believe you don't care. You lied." But she wore Molly's face now, and the real Molly knew very well that I cared. That was the strange thing. John was a brother to me—a normal, warm one, not like Mycroft—but sometimes he missed the undercurrents. In that respect, however, Molly was just like the Science Girl in my own mind—she always knew how I felt.

Over time, of course, John came to understand, but Molly had always understood first, from the moment she met me, I think. Maybe it's because, I realized as I knew her longer, we weren't as different as we seemed. She, too, had chosen an alienating profession, and she rarely showed her deeper nature to the world. We were two people inclined to show off our least attractive selves and to keep the engaging parts hidden inside.

She wasn't nearly as sorry to lose Jim as she acted like she was. She thought she was supposed to be sad, I think. After all, most people are sad after a breakup. But she wasn't, not really. He hadn't touched the core of who she was. That I could see, though I didn't let myself consider the implications.

I didn't really see it then, but somewhere between meeting Molly and knowing, irrevocably, that the avatar woman in my mind would never again stop wearing her face, emotion crept into my Memory Palace and refused to leave.

Some of it was John; much of it was Molly; I guess, perhaps, a bit of it was just getting older. Lestrade would probably say he contributed, too. I had decided, long before, not to feel, but it didn't work any more.

As you know, feelings are dangerous. When you open the door to them, they're apt to sweep you up in a flood and carry you somewhere you never intended to go. Facts can be controlled; feelings are big and risky and unwieldy.

"You know, Sherlock, your feelings were here all along," the Science Girl told me. "I kept them for you." It was the strangest realization of all to finally understand that the brown-haired woman in my mind who was supposed to represent logic and fact and reasoning was also the receptacle of the emotions I'd tried to bury for years.

I suppose that's how Molly Hooper was, too. She was a brown-haired pathologist with a mind attuned to the dead, but she was also a heart, with intuition I could read in the eyes that followed me across her laboratory.


	11. Mistakes

Few people are good at admitting their mistakes. I am even less adept at it than most. I created myself, and my Mind Palace, with a thought toward perfection, even when I was a very young child. If I was always right, I thought, I could never be in danger. When I was small, mistakes brought ridicule from my brother and my schoolmates. When I became an adult, they cost lives.

Of course, there is a difference between mistaking the perpetrator of a murder and hurting someone's feelings, a distinction that, after a while, I ignored. I told myself that if I didn't care what anyone thought of me, they shouldn't care what I thought of them. It was a shield between me and the world, meant to keep me safe from facing my fallibility.

And then a Christmas party happened that changed me forever.

I will never forget the moment Molly Hooper walked through the door. It's fortunate for me that Lestrade reacted as strongly as he did. No one saw that my face changed, too. She looked like my Science Girl, but dressed up like a Christmas present. And she was beautiful. It's not that—this is difficult to express in adequate words—it's not that she was only beautiful just then, in her dress, with her lips red. It was just that I realized, for the first time, that to me she had always been beautiful.

And so, of course, I hurt her. I didn't mean to do it, but when I realized exactly where my deductions pointed, I was scared, frightened that someone would see how confused I was, like a little boy seeing girls at a school dance suddenly gone from tomboys in pigtails to women in crinolines and high heels.

"You always say such horrible things."

At that moment, Molly Hooper, for the first time, said the exact same thing my Science Girl would have said. Her voice echoed in my mind, and I could see her both in front of me and inside my head, with the same hurt look on her face.

So I did something I never did. I apologized. And because she was Molly, she understood. She knew that something between us had irrevocably changed, knew that I loved her, I think, though I didn't know it yet.

I kissed her cheek, and electricity moved through me. The moment broke quickly, or I might have lost more control than I'd already surrendered, but it was enough. Everyone else in the room simply though I'd somehow reached greater enlightenment, greater ability to see my flaws.

It's true; I had. But only Molly knew it was more than that. The Science Girl smiled inside my head, and she wore Molly's smile.

That night, as I slipped into bed, I visited the morgue in my mind. "Well done, Sherlock," said the girl, sitting on the edge of a metal table next to a corpse and applauding slowly.

"Silly mistake," I groused.

She laughed. "Sometimes mistakes are useful. Sometimes they show us who our friends are, who we really love. They bring us closer."

I couldn't deny it. My Memory Palace was no longer the deceptively perfect place I'd imagined. I now saw it for what it was—the flawed creation of a man deeply capable of error. It should have unsettled me, but it didn't. I knew I was simply seeing the truth for what it was, and in so doing, my lips had touched the face of Molly Hooper, an act I could never undo—never wanted to undo.


	12. Falling

Fall: to come or go down quickly from a high place or position — Merriam-Webster Dictionary

I jumped off the roof of Molly's morgue on an ordinary day. But I shouldn't begin there, as much as I'd like to. The other things are difficult things, precious things, the things I want to tell you. But the wanting makes it harder to say them.

"You look sad when you think he can't see you." I'll start there because it was the moment I knew that Molly would be the one I trusted. The supreme irony of Moriarty is that she was the one he missed. It wasn't my triumph; it was hers. The woman who was extraordinary managed to seem so ordinary that he never stopped to consider that she might be the key to it all.

I didn't want to do what I knew I had to do. I wrestled with my avatars. I went to the courtroom inside my Memory Palace and let them come at me, one by one. I looked to my mother for a solution, but mathematics was irrelevant. I tried my father, the ever-present representation of common sense in my mind, but all I saw was his smiling face, telling me it would be all right, that I'd figure it out.

Finally, I visited the Science Girl who looked like Molly. "You know who to ask," she said calmly. I did; of course I did. I didn't honor Molly by asking for her help; she honored me by giving it. I told her my plan, and because she's clever, she understood it instantly—and the necessity of it.

I jumped off Molly's building, the Science Girl's building, and the mental one and the real one were jumbled in my mind as I fell toward the ground. But the physical part was only the beginning of the falling.

I was gone for a long time, as you know. I went many places and did many things. You already know about all of those. The thing that's harder to explain is how the days passed while I realized that I was falling in a different way—for a woman who wasn't perfect or infallible or a creation of my own imagination. Molly Hooper had been my friend for a long time. I didn't realize I was falling for her until it was too late to catch myself, until she'd become so much more that I could barely breathe. The months without her were an ache I can't describe, but it was a curiously beautiful feeling because I'd never experienced it before. I studied my own feelings like specimens under a microscope, but they were mysteries I couldn't fathom, and finally, I just gave in and let myself sink into them.

All of my life, I'd lived with a parachute, a mental obstacle to catch me whenever I began to feel too much or care too deeply. This time, I free-fell without anything to catch me but the memory of her smile.

Once, when I was in London, I visited her—not visibly; It was still too dangerous, and I didn't want my enemies to make the connection between us that they'd failed to discern. No, I went to her flat at the close of the work day and watched her walk across the carpark to the door, studying her walk and the way she held herself.

She looked good. Confident. Determined. She was different from the woman I'd first met, and something very sharp poked me inside when I realized that part of what had changed her was knowing that out of all the people in London, I'd chosen to trust her. I didn't deserve to be so important to her.

I took a plane to somewhere far away that night, and I leaned my head against the window and visited my Memory Palace. "You're different, too," said my Science Girl, smiling.

"I know," I sighed. "So are you. You don't sound like yourself any more."

"Of course not," she answered. "I sound like Molly now, the Real Girl." She wasn't just my construct any more. She looked like Molly, spoke like Molly, and moved like Molly. And when she talked, I had a feeling I wasn't just hearing my own thoughts any more. I had begun to hear what Molly herself would say. After all, I had come to know her very well.


	13. Accounting

When I came home, I was terrified. Oh, I took pains not to show it, but I knew that my life could not be the same, not when Molly was anywhere in the vicinity. That's why it didn't quite work, our partnership. I tried to make her like John, to be satisfied with that. But we were meant to be something very different, and we both knew it. She left me, and in her eyes I saw a question—it was to be all or nothing.

For once in my life, I was indecisive, too afraid to commit to the thing that would alter the course of my orderly world forever. I'd have understood if Molly had chosen to despise me for my lack of effort, but she never did. She just continued to be my friend and my ally, never complaining, never berating me for failing to figure out what she already knew.

I was an idiot, for a while, and it wasn't until I felt her hand across my face that I came to my senses. There's a reason films and television shows depict people being brought out of hysterics by a sharp, stinging slap.

I wasn't having a drug relapse, but I was glad she'd hit me anyway. I was being a child again, regressing into a boy who couldn't accept that his world needed to change, that John wasn't the only one who'd found someone worth changing his life for.

That slap brought tears springing to my eyes but a surge of adrenaline to my heart. I couldn't ignore any longer the obvious truth that both of us had been tiptoeing around for so long. She'd dated; I'd had a fake lover. Neither mattered, not when I looked into Molly's eyes and saw that her deep disappointment was motivated by deeper love.

I didn't care about giving an account of myself to anyone else. John already knew why I'd gone to the drug den, and I didn't care what Lestrade thought. But I felt a deep warmth settle inside my at the thought that Molly cared so very much. She was infuriated, but I was satisfied.

They tell me that all of my life, I will have danger nights, that after being addicted once, I will never stop craving the chemical that used to help me cope with a mind on fire. The moment Molly's palm connected with the side of my face, I knew: I would never face another danger night alone. I would be accountable to a small woman with brown hair, tied to her with strings as tough as steel.

I didn't have it in me to resist. When I finally made it home, I played my violin for the Science Girl in my mind, and for the first time, I willingly imagined that she was the Real Girl, because I knew, as I had never known before, that the real Molly Hooper, with her anger and her love and her fallibility, was far better than any mental construct could ever be.

"You're right, Sherlock," the Science Girl whispered. It wasn't as if she was leaving me; it was as if she'd become the person she was always meant to be.


	14. Dying

I didn't know what it was like to die until the day Mary shot me. I suppose it makes sense that my mind took me to my Memory Palace, my avatars flashing before my eyes one by one, trying to do their desperate best to keep me alive. I had depended on them to save others; now I needed them to save me.

I'd have stayed dead if it wasn't for the girl in the morgue. I stood over the vision of my own body, bullet-racked and lifeless, and I looked up to find Molly standing in front of me. I knew, in a fraction of a second, that the change was complete. My Science Girl was now, and forever, the Real Girl.

She was the one who stayed with me, the one who slapped me again, the one who saved me. When the other avatars were gone, when the light was receding into nothing but pale whiteness, she was with me. And even as I faced death, my mind racing, I loved her so much I thought that alone would kill me.

It makes so much sense—so much sense—that it was Molly who told me when to fall, for it was she, first as the Science Girl in my mind, and then as her real, flesh-and-blood self, who had been teaching me to fall for my entire life—to release the control I prized above everything else, to feel, to let go and become a whole self.

I have always been a man who wants to control his destiny. I take risks, but they are my own risks, the risks I calculate and the costs I count. I do not like to give in.

It was Molly who'd shown me what it meant to accept my feelings, by showing me that she saw them and still cared for me. It was she who had taught me to relinquish the illusion of perfection and admit my flaws because she would still care for me. She was the one who'd stood by me when I chose to fall off a building, giving in to an uncertain future. And finally, as my life seeped from my body, it was she who told me when to let go for the last time, the most important time of all.

I'd have been dead forever if she hadn't stayed with me.

I have never told you that part, about the way she stood by me in my mind when there was no one else, about how my last seconds were filled with flashes of her face. I was afraid it would upset you too much to know the truth about those seconds, but I can keep it from you no longer. Molly saved my life, as literally as if her physical self had been standing in front of me.

Little Sherlock, with his dog and his pirate ship, believed that science and logic were the most important things in the world, and so he created a Science Girl to represent all of those things. It was the Real Girl who finally showed him the truth, that no life can be complete without more than that.

She was the key that unlocked my heart, the heart an angry child had once buried inside an imaginary girl. All of my life's adventures and the winding corridors of my Mind Palace had finally led me to the reality that underpins all of existence. I'd been wrong, but I was happy to find out my error, there at the conclusion, when I thought I would never wake again. The mystery was finally solved, the cipher I'd been trying to solve for my entire life. Molly Hooper, the girl with brown hair and a while lab coat, solved it for me, her gift in my final seconds.

In the end, it was love that saved me, because, of course, love had been the answer all along.


	15. Hello

It was meant to be goodbye, this time for certain death, not the precise shot of a woman who didn't really want me dead. My brother's assignment held no possibility of survival. I had prepared my own tomb with a gunshot, willingly, to protect my friends, and I would do exactly the same thing again. For once, Mycroft was visibly emotional. John said the goodbye of a brother-in-arms.

Molly didn't kiss me, and I didn't kiss her. We both understood that we could neither of us bear to say final farewells with the taste of each other on our mouths. We simply stood next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, on the roof of St. Bart's, not talking. After a while, she put her hand in mine, and I closed my long fingers around her small ones.

"We could've been great," she said after a while, with tears in her voice.

"We were," I said, suddenly facing her and putting my hands on her shoulders. "There's—I won't live a day without seeing you in my mind." I wanted to impress the truth on her like a red-hot branding iron. I didn't want her to forget. "You'll be with me on every one of my adventures, just like you've been part of so many cases."

She cried, and she wrapped her arms around my waist, and I held her, memorizing the feeling of having her in my arms, making it live on in my Memory Palace, so that when I reached my last few seconds, I could die with my arms around her. I left, and she didn't come to the airfield. I told her not to. I couldn't bear to see her as I lifted off. I wanted to remember her as we were then, standing in the sunshine with our arms around each other.

You know, of course, that I was called back, that I never left England. But Molly didn't know because she wasn't there.

As soon as I'd greeted my friends again, I went to the St. Bart's morgue, Moriarty all but forgotten for the moment. There was only one thing I wanted to do and one person I wanted to see. She didn't hear me when I slipped through the doorway, too focused on a corpse, probably to keep from crying.

"Tough day, was it?" I asked.

She looked up and screamed, rushing toward me like a tornado of arms and legs. I picked her up so she could reach more of me, and she held on for dear life, like she would never again let go. Truth be told, I didn't want her to. Somewhere in the middle of the embrace, we found each other's lips. Kissing her was like falling into an ocean of happiness I had never known existed in the world.

Finally, after a long while, we both needed to breathe, and my arms were tired. I set her down gently, and she put her hands on both sides of my face, tracing my cheekbones and my lips and my eyelashes.

"You're mine, you know," she said.

"Of course I know," I answered.

I held out my arm, and she took it, and we went to Angelo's. This time I asked for a candle. We ate, and we stared at each other, and we didn't say much. Just seeing each other was enough. I stored every single one of her expressions in my Mind Palace, so that even when I wasn't with her, I could remember them and enjoy them as often as I liked.

Finally, when it was getting dark, I took her home and kissed her at the door of her flat. "You're quite the romantic," she said.

"Not at all," I scowled, but I didn't mind.

After that, we were. I don't know how to say what we were, but neither of us saw any reason to hide it, and all of our friends defined us—dating, relationship, in love. I don't know what it was. I only know that I could not live without her any more, and I had no desire to be independent if it meant being separated.

She liked corpses as much as I did, and I liked the library as much as she did. We spent our days in the morgue and most of our evenings reading about crime. Sometimes we talked; often we didn't. She liked to bake, and some things she made were even superior to Mrs. Hudson's efforts. I taught her to fight with a broadsword; she was surprisingly adept.

After three months, I took her to meet my mother and father. She was nervous; I wasn't. I knew they'd be delighted that their deeply eccentric son had come up with such a normal-looking woman. John and Mary said meeting the parents signified something huge; to me, it was only natural. I didn't enjoy spending large swaths of time with my mother and father, but it's not like she could escape knowing them.

Once, I told Molly something that I've never even considered telling another human being. We were together in my flat, and I was writing an article about cigarette burn patterns for my blog, while she read journal articles about pathology. "You know, Molly," I said, "being with you is entirely as gratifying as being alone."

Another kind of woman might not have understood that, but she did. In an instant, she'd crossed the room from her chair over to mine and perched on the edge of my knee. "I think that's probably the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me."

"Nothing nice about it," I replied. "Just the truth."

She put her fingers through my hair. "Sometimes the truth can be nice, you know. It's not all maiming and murder."

"Murders are lovely," I teased, but I didn't quite get the last word out because her mouth was on top of mine, which makes it very difficult to speak.

I'd never, for one moment, believed that I was the kind of man to marry. But after I'd been with Molly for half a year, it seemed like the most natural, logical thing in the world. I'd been in love with the Science Girl all of my life, and Molly was the real thing. I wanted her with me forever.

I brought my skull, and I went to the morgue. Where else was I going to propose? I have heard that most people are nervous when they're about to propose marriage, but I wasn't. It simply seemed like the inevitable conclusion that followed from the premises of our lives.

"Good morning, Sherlock," said Molly, smiling as soon as she saw me. "I thought you were going to the country today, to interview that monk about the giant rat he supposedly saw."

"Giant rat, Molly? Really? I didn't think you'd actually believe me."

She rolled her eyes. "I didn't, but I assumed you'd tell me what you were actually doing when you were ready."

"My purpose for coming here today is to tell you that I'd like nothing more than for you to be the legal co-guardian of this ridiculous object." I held out my skull to her.

She laughed, and then she started crying. "You always say such horrible, wonderful things." She took the skull, set it on a table, and faced me. "Look me in the eyes and tell me you love me." It was something I had never done, the one thing that still frightened me to the core.

I looked at her, and a host of imagines from my Mind Palace flashed through my mind—a girl who laughed on a pirate ship, the face that told me how to fall, the hand that slapped me. I took a deep breath and looked her straight in the eyes.

"Molly Hooper, I love you."

"Then," she said, nodding, "Sherlock Holmes, I would be very happy to marry you." Finally, she came to me and kissed me.

You kissed me, and it was the nicest kiss we'd had yet, because it contained all of our histories and all of our hopes. To me, it tasted like music.


	16. The Real Girl

So you see, Molly—my Molly—, this has been for you all along.

I am not a man who is good with feelings or romance. I have never looked at you and written poetry or lost the ability to think. No, Molly, what I am able to say is that you—my dream of you—has always been with me. You were the girl I waited for when I was eight, the one who comforted me when no one would believe my deductions, the friend I almost lost when my world went dark.

I thought I'd created the brown-haired girl, but really, I was just waiting. I was waiting to walk into a morgue and see a woman who is all the things I have wished for in a friend and all the things I never believed existed. I am the last man in the world who ever expected to fall in love, but in a way, I've been in love with you since I was eight years old.

People make avatars for all kinds of things—to represent themselves, to play games, to feel stronger and cleverer and more attractive than they really are, to hide.

I created the Science Girl because no one else understood me, and I didn't believe—I never thought—I couldn't fathom—that anyone real ever would.

The truth, Molly Hooper, is that you are the Real Girl. Before I met you, I thought that the real word was always ugly and inferior, nothing to the beautiful corridors of my Memory Palace—disordered and decaying.

After all, it is a law of the universe that all things tend toward decay.

But you have saved my life, and you have been my friend, and you have slapped my face and stood by my side and understood me and let me be myself to you—my best self and my worst self. Because of you, I have learned that sometimes, the real thing is better than the imagined one. You never meant to teach me; you did it by being yourself.

I cannot live without you. You are in my mind and in front of my eyes. Perhaps people would call that love; I don't know. I only know that your face is the one I want to see in my dreams and in my waking moments. I do love you, but that seems like such a shallow word for such a big thing.

Once, when I was a boy, I was taken to a garden. A tiny, brilliantly-colored butterfly alighted on a leaf next to me, and for a split second, I touched its wing with the tip of my finger. I felt reverence course through me because that butterfly was so very real, so very alive.

Don't fly away, Molly Hooper. Don't shy away from me. You make me reverent, too. Let me touch you. Let me take you in my arms and put my lips on yours. Show me what it is to be real. I have lived such a great deal of my life in my Mind Palace, as if I was one of my own avatars, a disembodied, unreal collection of thoughts and memories. But you have made me see that I am more, that I am a man with a beating heart who can be hurt and mistaken, but who can also feel happiness and love. My own mind tried to teach me these things, in the form of the Science Girl, but it was only when I met you that I really learned them.

I have waited for you for a lifetime. Come out of my Mind Palace and be my wife.

Tomorrow you will wear white. It's traditional for a bride to wear white on the day of her wedding, isn't it? And I'll wear a jacket like a good groom should. Never mind that your white comes from a lab coat and my coat is a Belstaff, not a formal. We've never cared about such things, and we never will. Marry me, Science Girl. Marry me and teach me to be realer than the realest thing I have ever known.

I watch you now, sitting there, looking through your microscope, engrossed completely in the task at hand. You are Molly, and you are my Science Girl. I now realize that, long ago, she finished becoming you, though it took me a long time to admit it.

I'm a little frightened, I admit, to hand you this letter. It tells a great many things I have never told another person, and perhaps it will come across as self-centered. But we're all self-centered by nature, Molly Hooper. That's why it's so astounding and so cataclysmic when we finally find the person who can make us see beyond ourselves.

For most of my life, the avatars in my head guided me, and the Science Girl was the one part of myself who questioned my choices and provided a mirror for me to see my faults when I was too proud and my virtues when I was too downcast. I am glad that, as a boy, I found her, because all of my life, she has contained the questions I didn't want to ask myself but couldn't afford to avoid. Your eyes ask me those questions now.

Molly, I see now that our own minds are limited, and we need others to truly show us who we are—and to love us anyway. I did not always think I needed love, but when it was offered, I realized that it was the thing I'd craved all along.

And so, in a moment, I will come over and stand beside you. You will get up, and stand on tiptoe, and kiss me full on the lips; we're alone, but you wouldn't care if we weren't. Sometimes I like to think—hope, at least—that I've been part of making you braver. I will hand you this letter, and you will read it.

I do not know what you will say, but when I picture you reading it in my mind, I picture you smiling.


End file.
